Best of the Archives: How to Change Your Habits | Katy Milkman
We’re almost at that time of year where we contemplate making New Year’s resolutions. So we decided to rerun an episode about the blazingly obvious fact that creating healthy habits can be infernally difficult. But why? And what are the best strategies for getting around this?
Katy Milkman has spent nearly two decades researching these questions. She's a behavioral scientist and professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She hosts a podcast called Choiceology and has written a book called How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. This episode explores why willpower is such an unreliable inner resource, why making habit change fun is such a powerful technique and key strategies from her quiver, such as the fresh start effect, temptation, bundling commitment devices, piggybacking and giving yourself a mulligan.
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Where to find Katy Milkman online:
- Website
- Subscribe to Katy’s newsletter
- Behavior Change for Good Initiative at The Wharton School
- Choiceology podcast
Book Mentioned:
Other Resources Mentioned:
- The Twilight Saga
- The Hunger Games Series
- James Patterson
- We Can Do Better — Improving the Health of the American People
- Ayelet Fishbach
- Kaitlin Woolley
- “More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes”
- Angela Duckworth
- Brian Galla
- Marissa Sharif, “The Benefits of Emergency Reserves in Goal Preference and Persistence”
- Suzanne Shu
- How The What-The-Hell Effect Impacts Your Willpower
- Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization
- Hengchen Dai
- Jason Riis
- Peer Effects: Do First-Year Classmates, Roommates, and Dormmates Affect Students’ Academic Success
- The Power of Habit
- James Clear, Atomic Habits
- Duolingo
- Lauren Eskreis-Winkler
- Seneca the Philosopher
- Stephen Spiller
- Carol Dweck
- Dolly Chugh on the Ten Percent Happier podcast
